Honey – a friendly old game

We recently completed a rather exciting project with the UN trying to work out how they might bring ethically produced honey from Mongolia to eco-hungry consumers in the UK. Not our average job, so the team made the strategic decision to start by searching high and low for anyone who might have the slightest idea what we should do.

Having spent a month on the phone to the exceptionally good natured Great British honey folk I now know the difference between a Scottish heather and a Spanish lavender, what the European Third List of Countries is, what to do with Royal Jelly, and why you can charge a tenner for a jar of Manuka! More importantly the beekeepers of Mongolia now know what it will take to bring their products to western shelves and can make an informed decision as to what that will mean to their businesses – all because of the good will of the UK’s very sweet honey community. Many many thanks! Next week it’s onto ethical fitness so if anyone’s got any ideas…

James Baderman

When the host becomes the hosted

Me and some of my ?What If! colleagues have just had the pleasure of leading the Big Boost Summer Academy for the UK’s brightest and best young social entrepreneurs - a week in west Sussex taking them through our thoughts on innovation and leadership and equipping them to better go forth and change the world.

Keeping the ‘gush’ to a minimum – this was a bit of a life changer. The individuals were nothing short of exceptional: hungry, passionate, honest, giving… and together as an entity ten times all that. This came to life wonderfully when we toured London’s social entrepreneurship scene. Walking round Green-Work’s recycling warehouse they stopped en masse to applaud the machinists, in Accenture’s corporate boardroom they banged the tables to thank our speakers, at the Big Lottery Fund they performed a well-mannered but seriously potent ‘pincer’ on the guy who looks after £600m of funding, and in Whitehall(!) they whooped, cheered and generally ‘made some noise’ as Phil Hope, the Minister for the Third Sector, walked into the tradition stooped room – this is the man in government who effectively rules their world. All this commotion was not just them being ‘yoof’, they were operating as a highly effective, sophisticated, collective entity – like some kind of advanced insect colony in a Planet Earth special. They occupied the space where ever they found themselves, and whoever we put in front of them. For our hosts it was disarming, flattering and invigorating all at once, and for the group it was an intensely powerful tool which they wielded well.

They’ve now returned to their projects up and down the UK but I have no doubt they will remain that powerful entity and be flipping tables on anyone who is lucky enough to host them for many years to come. We miss them and their unique energy, but I hear they’re planning to set up youth commission on social enterprise so something tells me it’s not the end!

James Baderman

Buzzword du Jour: Haptic

Haptic, from the Greek αφή (Haphe), means pertaining to the sense of touch (or possibly from the Greek word haptesthai meaning “contact” or “touch”). Haptic controllers allow the user to feel weight, shape, texture, and other tactile qualities of objects in a digital image. It's what the iPhone's interface promises, the Nintendo Wii uses and what Samsung's only-available-in-China-so-far competitor to the iPhone is. It's the new way of interacting with tech and it's coming to a mobile near you soon: tech experts predict 40% of new mobiles will have touch (haptic) screens by 2012.

Time says of our newly tactile tech:

"It's the realization of the core metaphor of modern consumer computing, dating back to the Macintosh or arguably to the first computer mouse, introduced in 1968. The idea was that we would all pretend that abstract digital information is physically real, that we could see it and manipulate it according to physical laws. The iPhone takes the graphical-user interface--the GUI, in the parlance, pronounced "gooey"--a step further and makes it a tactile user interface. You're viewing a little world where data are objects, and instead of just pressing your nose up against the glass, you can reach in and pinch and touch those bits and bytes with your hands. The word is made flesh. Any realer and it would be Tron."

Pictured is MIT's I/O brush from giladlotan's Flickr stream. I/O Brush looks like a regular physical paintbrush but has a small video camera with lights and touch sensors embedded inside. Outside of the drawing canvas, the brush can pick up color, texture, and movement of a brushed surface. On the canvas, artists can draw with the special "ink" they just picked up from their immediate environment.

How Apple Innovates

The Economist has a great article about how Apple gets the jump on most of its rivals ... key bits:

"The first [lesson] is that innovation can come from without as well as within. Apple is widely assumed to be an innovator in the tradition of Thomas Edison or Bell Laboratories, locking its engineers away to cook up new ideas and basing products on their moments of inspiration. In fact, its real skill lies in stitching together its own ideas with technologies from outside and then wrapping the results in elegant software and stylish design. The idea for the iPod, for example, was originally dreamt up by a consultant whom Apple hired to run the project. It was assembled by combining off-the-shelf parts with in-house ingredients such as its distinctive, easily used system of controls. And it was designed to work closely with Apple's iTunes jukebox software, which was also bought in and then overhauled and improved. Apple is, in short, an orchestrator and integrator of technologies, unafraid to bring in ideas from outside but always adding its own twists.

This approach, known as 'network innovation', is not limited to electronics. It has also been embraced by companies such as Procter & Gamble, BT and several drugs giants, all of which have realised the power of admitting that not all good ideas start at home. Making network innovation work involves cultivating contacts with start-ups and academic researchers, constantly scouting for new ideas and ensuring that engineers do not fall prey to 'not invented here' syndrome, which always values in-house ideas over those from outside."

Second, Apple illustrates the importance of designing new products around the needs of the user, not the demands of the technology. Too many technology firms think that clever innards are enough to sell their products, resulting in gizmos designed by engineers for engineers. Apple has consistently combined clever technology with simplicity and ease of use. The iPod was not the first digital-music player, but it was the first to make transferring and organising music, and buying it online, easy enough for almost anyone to have a go. Similarly, the iPhone is not the first mobile phone to incorporate a music-player, web browser or e-mail software. But most existing “smartphones” require you to be pretty smart to use them.

Apple is not alone in its pursuit of simplicity. Philips, a Dutch electronics giant, is trying a similar approach. Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, perhaps the most Jobsian of Europe's geeks, took an existing but fiddly technology, internet telephony, to a mass audience by making it simple, with Skype; they hope to do the same for internet television. But too few technology firms see “ease of use” as an end in itself.

Stay hungry, stay foolish

Listening to customers is generally a good idea, but it is not the whole story. For all the talk of “user-centric innovation” and allowing feedback from customers to dictate new product designs, a third lesson from Apple is that smart companies should sometimes ignore what the market says it wants today. The iPod was ridiculed when it was launched in 2001, but Mr Jobs stuck by his instinct. Nintendo has done something similar with its popular motion-controlled video-game console, the Wii. Rather than designing a machine for existing gamers, it gambled that non-gamers represented an untapped market and devised a machine with far broader appeal.

The fourth lesson from Apple is to “fail wisely”. The Macintosh was born from the wreckage of the Lisa, an earlier product that flopped; the iPhone is a response to the failure of Apple's original music phone, produced in conjunction with Motorola. Both times, Apple learned from its mistakes and tried again. Its recent computers have been based on technology developed at NeXT, a company Mr Jobs set up in the 1980s that appeared to have failed and was then acquired by Apple. The wider lesson is not to stigmatise failure but to tolerate it and learn from it: Europe's inability to create a rival to Silicon Valley owes much to its tougher bankruptcy laws."

Curry wine

The Guardian reports - as we did a few months' back - on the emerging trend of wines specifically marketed to be drunk with the UK's favourite cuisine.

Resignation by Flickr

We've seen resignation via blog but now comes (apparently) the first major Flickr resignation. John Curley, deputy managing director of the San Francisco Chronicle had this to say accompanying his photo of him clearing his desk:

"what's up with me

Last Thursday was my last day at the San Francisco Chronicle. I had been there for 25 years, which seems absolutely impossible, but is nevertheless true.

My last position was deputy managing editor. Over the years I had been a copy editor, a news editor, the sports editor, an assistant managing editor, and then a deputy managing editor.

I leave with great sadness, but not a trace of bitterness. We all know what is happening to the newspaper industry, and it is not pretty.

Even though this is officially termed a "reduction in force," I am surprised and dismayed that the organization thinks it can have a future without me. To be honest, I thought I'd get the chance to help lead the paper where it needed to go to compete successfully in the digital age. But instead, off I go.

Thirteen other newsroom managers are leaving along with me, including my boss, the managing editor, Robert Rosenthal. Shortly, union job cuts will begin. It had previously been announced that 100 of the 381 editorial jobs at the Chronicle will be eliminated at this time.

It's a bad time for me, and a bad time for the paper, but most importantly, I think it's a bad time for the democracy."

But not -- it seems -- for the new democracy online ...

A need to know of now

UK thinktank Demos has just published a new report on collaborative culture, "Logging on: culture, participation and the web".

Here are some of the key points made:

• Digitisation has changed everything. It has created public expectations for on-demand, constantly available, individualised access to products. It has also challenged the assumptions of cultural sector professionals that their role is to oversee public access to culture in the sense that they act as gatekeepers to what is produced, what is shown and how it is interpreted. In the analogue world, the public was able to engage with culture on terms set by experts and professionals: content, pricing, format and timing were all decided by the producer. In a world of infinitely replicable and manipulable digital content, this no longer applies. The full implications of this for the cultural sector are not yet clear. Big business is worried and confused and is seeking to hang on to as many 'rights' as it can. Meanwhile private, public and third sector innovations from Amazon to the BBC to Wikipedia march inexorably on, and internet phenomena like Second Life and MySpace revolutionise the landscape in the space of months.
• No more than one in four UK households had internet access at the start of 2000. And, even if available, the web was accessed via painfully slow dial-up or ISDN connections and the nature and extent of online content was reflected in this. Websites were typically text-based, with little in the way of moving image or sound, and the early adopters of more complex web presences were penalised: people just could not access sites with flashy graphics. The internet was generally perceived as a passive resource for searching and retrieving information; few websites provided opportunities for interaction.
  
• Today, practically anyone in the UK who wishes to access the internet can do so [claims the report]. A crucial development has been the introduction and rapid widespread take-up of broadband, set off by BT's launch of its DSL (digital subscriber line) products in late 2000. The proportion of broadband subscribers then increased annually, and reached 72.6 percent by June 2006. Funded by the National Lottery via the People's Network programme, 80 percent of public libraries now have an broadband internet connection.
  
• Recent surveys have shown that people in the UK now spend more time on the web than watching TV. In particular new technologies, from SMS to gaming to web usage, have been rapidly adopted by young people. This move -- from watching TV, to gaming and the web -- is significant because it involves not just a change of media, but a shift from passivity to interactivity. Schoolchildren today are as attuned to IT as past generations were to blackboards, timetables and spelling tests. How, our children complete their education with skills and expectations based almost entirely on the digital age - a radical generational shift. By the age of 17, the average schoolchild in the UK will have spent more time in front of a screen that in school.
• There has also -- and perhaps most crucially -- been a distinct change in the past couple of of years towards more interactive and collaborative online content - often dubbed 'Web 2.0'. Since 2001, a mass of services facilitating user-generated content, information-sharing and social networking have been launched and have gained phenomenal popularity. For example, Wikipedia, a free content online encyclopaedia, was set up in January 2001 and currently has over five million entries in several languages. The peer-to-peer filesharing service Kazaa was set up in March 2001, the video sharing site YouTube in February 2005. Blogging has spread like wildfire -- in April 2007 Technorati was tracking over 75 million blogs. The social networking site MySpace, launched in July 2003, surpassed the milestone of 100 million accounts in August 2006.
  
• (Google) is often called ubiquitous, but there is more to it than reach. It is not so much that Google is everywhere we look ... it's more that it is the means by which we look, and that, so often when we do look, we look online. Google does something new. Just as it does with all that it covers, it opens the arts and culture to a whole new audience. As well as reaching new eyes, it also presents culture in a totally different and more participatory way. Through the self-ordering preferences of its users it manifests the power of public engagement and displays a barometer of public will. This is an important point. New web tools enable users collectively to express their preferences through their actions, without having to be asked.
  
• Social tagging ... allows the user to apply keywords to any item of online content. Then the content can be viewed from the perspective of the users, not just the creators of that content. The results can be syndicated as feeds or viewed for navigation purposes as 'tag clouds' where the most commonly used words appear larger than other words. These tag clouds are sometimes called 'folksonomies' (the opposite of rigid taxonomies) because they represent the diverse perspectives from which people view a piece of content.
• What we are seeing now are tools that build on and extend 'Web 2.0' trends:
• mashups: linking of feeds of feeds so that content continues to be combined and 'mashed up' in new ways
  
• small social networking sites: alongside or instead of large, global social networks, some may find it useful to keep social networks small. See Vox.
  
• linking the online and offline in new ways: linking physical products with online services is just one way that online and offline networks are joining up. It becomes possible to unleash the power of social networking among people who share a product or geographical location. An iPod is much more useful when coupled with the music searching and sharing activities of MySpace. An advocacy website like avaaz.org will send targeted messages to people based on their postcodes as well as their interests.

• New tools are emerging that encourage interactivity, connectedness and creativity. Rival conceptions of intellectual ownership are being used ad hoc by people to negotiate their own paths into the world of culture and creativity. Lawrence Lessig has recently described the battle between read-only and read-write on the web in his book, Free Culture. The first is where professionals and corporations own the copyright of culture and the public are allowed access to it at a price. Amazon and iTunes are examples of this way of working. Amazon will not list a publication unless it has a price tag; iTunes does not sell music, it rents it out in order to keep reaping continual rewards. Read-write is a freer and more open concept where people build their own culture. Examples here include MySpace, where people can post their own music files, and YouTube, which performs a similar role for the moving image. Both the commercial and open source models have been phenomenally successful and popular.

Another 'way in' to all this stuff is to watch this short film.

PS3 for Protein Research

Finally some good PR for Sony. In a great example of open innovation, Stanford University recently used Sony Playstation 3 consoles to do some serious number-crunching research.

The BBC reports: "Attempts to understand diseases such as Alzheimers have got a boost from Sony's PlayStation 3 console. More than 250,000 PS3 owners have enrolled their console in the Folding@Home project which uses it to study the shapes proteins assume.So many have signed up that the project has carried out a year's worth of research in a month.

Proteins that do not fold correctly have been implicated in diseases such as Alzheimers and BSE.

The Folding@Home (F@H) project uses idle machines, be they PCs or game consoles, to simulate how proteins, the building blocks of life, assume the forms that play key roles in living tissue."

The Second (Dot)Coming

A second Internet goldrush appears to be underway but this time the buzzwords are 'social' and 'media'. In scenes reminiscent of oooh...1997 investors and high profile folk all over the place are launching new sites and investing in old ones. The latest? One-to-watch (literally) video search engine Blinkx.

The Independent reports today that shares in Blinkx surged 40 per cent after the company's market debut as investors clamoured to invest in the world's largest internet video search provider.

Blinkx has been spun out of Autonomy, the contextual internet search specialist that has retained a 10 per cent stake in the business. While Autonomy has often struggled to explain the significance and potential of its complex technology to befuddled investors, it appears that the rapid success of internet video companies such as YouTube has underlined the growth prospects of Blinkx.

In scenes reminiscent of the dotcom boom that characterised the markets in the early part of this decade, Blinkx shares surged 40 per cent to 63p on the first day of trading on the AIM market. The initial listing price of 45p a share was already at the top end of the pricing range and the IPO was strongly oversubscribed. Blinkx ended the day with a market capitalisation of £175m.

Blinkx offers more than 13 million hours of indexed video content, making it the largest video search engine in the world. Mr Chandratillake said the company's technology provides "the critical link" between the consumer and the fragmented online content industry. It processed 1.1 million searches last month alone.

The company has raised £25m that will be used predominantly to bulk up its sales and development staff. Mr Chandratillake said the company was looking to launch a broadband-based television service. He added that the company was also looking to develop an advertising platform.

It remains to be seen if any of these platforms will really make money. How oddly familiar ...

Hamster Shredder

Tom Ballhatchet's hamster-powered paper shredder. Via Core77 design blog.

Clothes out-selling tech online

According to the New York Times today, for the first time since online retailing was born a decade ago, the sales of clothing have overtaken those of computer hardware and software, suggesting that consumers have reached a new level of comfort buying merchandise on the Web.

In 2006, online revenue from skirts, suits and shoes reached $18.3 billion, surpassing that from PCs, printers and word-processing programs, which totaled $17.2 billion, according to a report to be released today by a major trade group. This year, 10 percent of all clothing sales in North America are expected to occur online.

"Apparel retailers have overcome a number of hurdles to encourage shoppers to buy clothing and accessories online," said Scott Silverman, executive director of Shop.org, which conducted the research along with Forrester. "Retailers are doing such a great job online that in some cases it's easier to find and buy clothing on the web than it is in a store."

The report suggests that the apparel and accessories category has experienced strong sales because of an influx of new companies and liberal shipping policies such as free shipping on returns and exchanges. Additionally, apparel and accessories retailers are integrating new technologies onto their sites including rich imaging, where customers can zoom and rotate merchandise or see the item in different colors before buying, all of which eases the mind of a customer who is hesitant to purchase apparel online.

We're guessing but given that the survey covered 170 retailers in America, sales via eBay haven't even been taken wholly into consideration (many mainstream retailers now sell via eBay Stores as well as their own sites) . Ironic, given that the eBay economy is likely driving behaviour.

Eating the Kool-Aid

Years ago, it was apparently very fashionable in the States to use Kool Aid as hair dye (check its Wikipedia entry/other uses). Now, the stuff is being used to candy-fy pickles.

The New York Times reports:

"The pickles have been spotted as far afield as Dallas and St. Louis, but their cult is thickest in the Delta region, among the black majority population. In the Delta, where they fetch between 50 cents and a dollar, Kool-Aid pickles have earned valued space next to such beloved snacks as pickled eggs and pigs’ feet at community fairs, convenience stores and filling stations.

....

When this writer, lugging a jar of tropical-fruit-flavored pickles, recently asked the 29 students who liked to eat Kool-Aid pickles, 29 hands shot up.

The names came fast: Ladarius, Fredericka and Kobreana, among others. So did the impressions: “It’s a candy pickle.” And “I like it the same as dipping hot Cheetos in ice cream.” And “Have you ever tried one with a watermelon Blow Pop?” followed by a pantomime of how the Blow Pop stick can be inserted so that the candy appears as a knob at one end of the pickle, allowing the eater to alternate between bites of sour-sweet pickle and licks of sweet-sour Blow Pop.

No patent application has been filed, but the name Kool-Aid is a trademark owned by Kraft Foods. Upon learning of the pickles, Bridget MacConnell, a senior manager of corporate affairs at Kraft, recovered, and then pronounced, “We endorse our consumers’ finding innovative ways to use our products.”

Design for the other 90%

"Design for the Other 90%" is a new exhibition running through Sept. 23 at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City focusing on sustainable innovation. A few of its highlights will be familiar: The Katrina Furniture Project, the One Laptop Per Child initiative and Lifestraw (pictured), for instance, have both received generous media attention.

In featuring more than 30 innovative tools—each of which addresses issues such as safe drinking water, shelter, health and sanitation, education, and transportation—curator Cynthia Smith hopes to illuminate the critical need for humanitarian design. "It's a call to action," says Smith, who has worked for the Lee Skolnick Architecture + Design Partnership and studied at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "We're trying to show that design can change lives."

While these consumers face many issues—poor shelter, limited medical care, and substandard school systems—developing appropriate solutions is easier said than done. To craft low-cost, high-impact remedies, like the ones featured in "Design for the Other 90%," Smith says innovators must "get creative." "There's more than one way to fix the world's problems," she explains, adding that roughly 2.8 billion people live on less than $2 a day. "We're trying to showcase a variety of solutions."

Read more and see a slideshow of some of the innovations at Businessweek online.

NPD in Amsterdam

Postcard 'poop scoop' with fold out bag. Bio-degradable and recycled. Of course.

Balti Wine

Following on from the success of Cobra Beer which cashed in on Brits' love of curry and beer, Balti Wine hopes to capture wine/curry lovers.

The Independent reports:

“One in four people in Britain eats a curry at least once a week. Couple this with British people's growing love of wine and you'll see why Ashraf Sharif's business idea has been such a hit. Balti Wine, his simple range of five wines to complement spicy foods, is already revolutionising the drinking habits of curry lovers and the company looks set to grow from strength to strength.

"It's no gimmick," insists Sharif, 53, whose headquarters are in Newton Heath, Manchester. Indeed, it took four years of extensive research in collaboration with Manchester University's food science department, and samples from around the globe, before Sharif and his advisers were happy with the grape selections.

"At first, Indian wines seemed the obvious answer, but we found people didn't like them because they're not used to them," he says, explaining that the wines they eventually chose come from the Southern Hemisphere. The New World, he explains, tends to make wines that have an upfront fruity style that complements the spice in the food.

"These wines - three whites and two reds - each have a 'chilli rating' from one chilli to five, helping drinkers to choose which one is appropriate for their selected food," he adds.

Since the company's launch in 2004, Balti Wine has sold over 700,000 bottles, which retail at between £10 and £15 in restaurants. Sharif now supplies 65 per cent of the North-west's Indian restaurants and six per cent of all Indian restaurants nationally. "Between 50 to 100 restaurants a day are taking on Balti Wines," he says.”

Having secured VC funding, Balti Wine now has plans to expand into the States. One to watch.

Google is the world's most valuable brand.

The FT reported this week that Google is now worth $66.4 billion, ahead of GE, Microsoft and Coca-Cola.

The speed of the company's ascent has been astounding: the domain name google.com was only registered in 1997. Google's ranking jumped to the top spot from No. 7 a year ago, based on a 77 percent increase in the value of its brand. By contrast, Microsoft, which led the survey in 2006, tumbled because of an 11 percent drop in the perceived value of its brand.

The other top brands were as follows:

1. Google ... $66.4 billion
2. GE ... $61.9 billion
3. Microsoft ... $55 billion
4. Coca-Cola ... $44.1 billion
5. China Mobile $41.2 billion

Wag the Dog

It's good to know that out there, somewhere, someone is investigating how and why dogs wag their tails. The New York Times is reporting that when dogs feel fundamentally positive about something or someone, their tails wag more to the right side of their rumps. When they have negative feelings, their tail wagging is biased to the left.

A study describing the phenomenon, “Asymmetric tail-wagging responses by dogs to different emotive stimuli,” appeared in the March 20 issue of Current Biology. The authors are Giorgio Vallortigara, a neuroscientist at the University of Trieste in Italy, and two veterinarians, Angelo Quaranta and Marcello Siniscalchi, at the University of Bari, also in Italy.

“This is an intriguing observation,” said Richard J. Davidson, director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. It fits with a large body of research showing emotional asymmetry in the brain, he said.

Research has shown that in most animals, including birds, fish and frogs, the left brain specializes in behaviors involving what the scientists call approach and energy enrichment. In humans, that means the left brain is associated with positive feelings, like love, a sense of attachment, a feeling of safety and calm. It is also associated with physiological markers, like a slow heart rate.

At a fundamental level, the right brain specializes in behaviors involving withdrawal and energy expenditure. In humans, these behaviors, like fleeing, are associated with feelings like fear and depression. Physiological signals include a rapid heart rate and the shutdown of the digestive system.

Because the left brain controls the right side of the body and the right brain controls the left side of the body, such asymmetries are usually manifest in opposite sides of the body. Thus many birds seek food with their right eye (left brain/nourishment) and watch for predators with their left eye (right brain/danger).

In humans, the muscles on the right side of the face tend to reflect happiness (left brain) whereas muscles on the left side of the face reflect unhappiness (right brain).

Dog tails are interesting, Dr. Davidson said, because they are in the midline of the dog’s body, neither left nor right. So do they show emotional asymmetry, or not?

To find out, Dr. Vallortigara and his colleagues recruited 30 family pets of mixed breed that were enrolled in an agility training program. The dogs were placed in a cage equipped with cameras that precisely tracked the angles of their tail wags. Then they were shown four stimuli through a slat in the front of the cage: their owner; an unfamiliar human; a cat; and an unfamiliar, dominant dog.

In each instance the test dog saw a person or animal for one minute, rested for 90 seconds and saw another view. Testing lasted 25 days with 10 sessions per day.

When the dogs looked at an aggressive, unfamiliar dog — a large Belgian shepherd Malinois — their tails all wagged with a bias to the left side of their bodies.

Thus when dogs were attracted to something, including a benign, approachable cat, their tails wagged right, and when they were fearful, their tails went left, Dr. Vallortigara said. It suggests that the muscles in the right side of the tail reflect positive emotions while the muscles in the left side express negative ones.

Expect this research to be among the front-runners for this year's Ignobel Awards.

Sight Beyond Seeing

A book of photographs by blind teenagers. The project is the brain child of visual artist and social entrepreneur Tony Deifell, who says:

"Photography wasn't the obvious subject to teach at Governor Morehead School for the Blind.

Even Jackie, one of the first three students to take the class, was incredulous: "What are you thinking, teaching photography to blind people?"

As a photographer, I feared losing my eyesight and began to wonder, "If I were blind, could I still make photographs?""

Pictured is Melody's self portrait. See also, Ways of Seeing.

Well Golly

• Five hundred Britons are leaving the UK every day to live in the sun or find work abroad, according to the Office of National Statistics. A record 380,000 people left the country in 2005.

• Comics account for 25% all book sales in South Korea.

• Traffic injuries are the leading cause of death in people ages 10 to 24 around the world, according to the World Health Organisation.

• Nearly 182,000 new items were launched globally during 2006, according to market analysts Mintel. Food and drink products made up nearly 105,000 of the releases - around 290 new goods for every day of the year.

• More than a third of American adult internet users (36%) consult the citizen-generated online encyclopedia Wikipedia, according to a new nationwide survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. And on a typical day in the winter of 2007, 8% of online Americans consulted Wikipedia.

Periodic Table of Visualisation Methods

Nicked from Cool Tools who say, "If you've ever wondered how to model something, or were looking for new ideas for segmenting and presenting complex concepts, this is an incredible online resource. A neat graphical explanation and example of each "element" (ex; a cycle diagram) appears as soon as your cursor scrolls over them. What I like most is that the categorisers have thoroughly sliced the categorising! For instance, they've color-coded their categories: data, metaphor, concept, strategy, information, and compound visualisation techniques. As if that were not enough to spark your brain, the creators also provide clues as to whether the model works best for convergent or divergent thinking, and whether it is more for an overview vs. detailed perspective. So far, I have used it mostly for inspiration, especially the metaphor models, but this resource has given me ideas and structure and the appropriate language for my work as a process designer and facilitator. I also passed this onto a 7th grade teacher friend of mine who is using it with his entire class!"

The table itself is here.

Created by Dr. Martin J. Eppler & Ralph Lengler, University of Lugano, Switzerland of Visual Literacy.org.

Innocentive

InnoCentive serves as a crowd-sourcing R&D broker. Companies can post R&D challenges to their site and 90,000 independent researchers in 175 countries have an opportunity to tackle them. Interestingly, many of the solutions come from "left field": physicists who easily solve what are nominally difficult chemistry problems, for example. Rewards range from $25,000 to $1 million, which works out pretty cheap given that American firms spend around $200 billion on R&D annually.

See also: The Rise and Fall of Corporate R&D, The Economist.

The Business of Innovation

"The Business of Innovation is a series of 5 one-hour programmes produced by CNBC, the worldwide leader in business news, which explores in-depth the most important topic in the business world today - Innovation. Each program will explore a different aspect of Innovation using CNBC's global newsgathering capabilities, well-known current and former CEO's and innovation experts to dissect the topic and provide guidance for viewers seeking to innovate in their own organizations. The series is hosted by award-winning journalist Maria Bartiromo, who calls the programmes "...ground breaking in scope"."

And it's all watchable in your own time, online.

Another Dog

This time - Freeway - met at pub yesterday.

Speed shopping

A company called ShopText has introduced a system that lets people buy products instantly using text messages, a process that eliminates the need to go to a store or even visit a Web site. For instance, a woman seeing an ad for a pocketbook in a magazine can order it on the spot simply by sending the text code found beside the item through her cellphone.

To use the system, a consumer must first place a phone call to ShopText to set up an account, specifying a shipping address and card account. After that, all purchases can be made by thumb.

When ShopText receives text messages about donations or products, it charges the credit card it has on file for the buyer, then, if appropriate, sends the product from one of its warehouses around the country.

ShopText was started in 2005 within Anomaly, an ad agency in New York, and worked at first with the PayPal unit of eBay to build text-message shopping tools. In November, ShopText was spun off as its own company, and since then it has been busy trying to persuade media outlets and marketers that mobile phone shopping, or m-commerce, stands to become as lucrative as e-commerce. As with all new business launches nowadays, ShopText comes with a social-good element as a core aspect of the brand: its mantra is 'shop. sample. donate'.

“E-commerce only represents a fraction of total retail — the thing that holds it back is it’s tethered to an Internet connection,” said Mark Kaplan, founder and chief marketing officer of ShopText. “The cellphones link products to media. When people get the impulse to buy, they have their cellphones.” And even better, people have their phones with them *all the time*.

Source: New York Times.

Tilly

This gerbil lives with Charlotte Ross.

Dog on a blog

Introducing Sejal's Raffy.

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Free Internet to save the rainforest

The Brazilian government recently announced that they will make free satellite internet available to native Indian tribes throughout the Amazon region as a way to enhance monitoring, management and conservation efforts. Basically, using tribespeople to as environmental police against threats such as illegal logging.

The goal is to "encourage those peoples to join the public powers in the environmental management of the country," Francisco Costa of the Environment Ministry said in a statement. "The government intends to strengthen the Forest People's Network, a digital web for monitoring, protection and education."

Local governments will be charged with the task of installing telecenters in various places, including deep in wilderness areas on indigenous land, and the federal government will then supply satellite internet connections to those sites.

There are concerns that the arrival of connectivity may erode the tribes' traditional way of life but, as Ailton Krenak, a member of the Krenak tribe as well as the network, told MSNBC,"I don't like computers but I don't like planes either," he said. "What can you do?"

Source: Worldchanging.

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